Capturing decision logic is a mandatory activity of any decision automation project. Ultimately, business users want to be empowered and allowed to create and maintain business rules without technical assistance.
The complexity of decision logic elicitation stems from the fact that Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are forced to think exhaustively about any and all rules that govern their business. This activity not only requires a lot of time but is also foreign to most SMEs because it is out of the realm of their normal day-to-day workflow. More often than not, incomplete decision logic which does not reflect how the business effectively operates is made, then several iterations are required to complete the process. This elicitation process does not guarantee that the resulting logic is in line with the company's business objectives.
In the prior art, the approaches to solve this issue have relied on heavy up-front investment along with long and wide preparation phases to mitigate the risk. Some examples include the creation of centers of excellence, the involvement of scarce and expensive specialists from vendor firms and the use of System Integrators (SIs) which is a person or company that specializes in bringing together component subsystems into a whole and ensuring those subsystems function together.
Some companies have developed a business around decision logic capture using methodology or software. Such solutions guide SMEs through the elicitation process to translate requirements into a form that is closer to a business rules format. In these solutions, the requirements represent the source business rules to be encoded.
Companies have also developed various systems based on using decision metaphors, rule templates, case-based reasoning, expert interviewing, or ripple-down rule creation. Decision metaphors are used to represent rules in a more graphical form, for example, decision trees, decision table, decision graph, decision flow, or scorecard. In certain circumstances, these are easy to manipulate by business users. The rule templates approach provides business users with specific tailored applications that enable the user to have an application specific view on decisions. The case-based reasoning approach relies on a large database of solved cases against which new cases are compared allowing the selection of closest cases and the assignment of the corresponding decision result. Expert interviewing constructs decisions through successive interviews of experts following one or another methodology. Finally, the approach using ripple-down rules uses cases to gradually refine an exception-based directed acyclic graph of conditions ending in actions that define a decision.